Local Republicans, if you take nothing else from the egregious fact that the Trump administration has opened concentration camps for Spanish-speaking children, please know that Donald Trump's insistence that a Democrat-passed law makes them do it is just another outrageous Trump lie.
The Trump ploy of separating children from parents at the border isn't a law at all. It's a policy - approved by Trump and called by his administration a "zero-tolerance" policy - announced with fanfare last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As more families are stopped for illegally crossing the border, more adults are taken to detention facilities that are effectively jails, and children, more than 2,000 in recent weeks, have been sent to largely dog-kennel-like detention camps.
In crafting the policy, Sessions has made and used his own interpretation of a 1997 legal agreement and a 2008 bipartisan anti-human-trafficking bill as requiring the separation of families.
But listen up: Sessions' hard-line interpretation was never - repeat, never - an interpretation or position taken by the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations which were in power in 1997 and 2008 and after. Only the Trump administration has chosen to make this interpretation and to pursue this inhuman and morally corrupt path.
President Trump can stop it with a phone call this minute should he choose to do so.
Instead, children have been separated from their parents and taken to cages in empty big box stores or even tents under the hot summer sun.
There is no excuse for this craven cruelty, but Sessions last week invoked God and the Bible to conjure up another "law" to justify these pathetic immigration policies, which include splitting up families that arrive at U.S. borders seeking asylum:
"I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order," Sessions said.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders spouted the same kind of blasphemy, saying "It is very biblical to enforce the law."
Apparently Trump, Sessions and Sanders didn't get to the book of Luke in the New Testament when Jesus said: "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God."
Republicans: Would God see this as Trump making America great again?